


yellow girl

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:34:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23829172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Relationships: Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler & Kujaku Mai | Mai Valentine
Kudos: 3





	yellow girl

Jounouchi thinks of Kujaku Mai an inestimable number of times per year, though roughly it’s about the same as every November twentieth, every Mother’s Day, and every time that commercial for the big voluminous eyelash mascara comes on between AKBINGO episodes.

Sometimes he rolls the house phone around in his hands when the dark of the kitchen turns his face beautiful. He rehearses how he’ll say hi, how ya been, how he’ll craft some funny nothing about the jutting sound of his father’s snores in the background. When she picks up, he’ll tell her he hopes he didn’t wake her, it’s eleven:thirty, after all, but somewhere he knows he’d shudder with the pride of knowing she’d answered at all. But there’s the very likely route that the phone’ll ring and ring and ring as he sweats the receiver right out of his hand. Can he take that? Can he? Of course he can, but the phone clanks back on the hook, anyway, because it’s almost midnight and he’s got months of missed school work to start making up now that the world’s glued back together. 

A fine line sunders how he remembers Kujaku Mai and how he thinks of her. The latter’s the sweetest. In his thoughts, she’s a yellow girl, broad shouldered and wide hipped, but her hands are delicate, her eyes velvet. In his thoughts she stands as a silhouette on the edge of Domino Pier. She’s got legs for miles beneath the tiny skirt of her sundress, yellow and floral and over her big yellow hair she’s wearing a wicker hat. Her shadow hits the water alongside the sunset, and behind the yellow girl it’s all melty orange and smoldering red across the sky where it meets the ocean. He thinks Mai is beautiful, and he remembers she’s a megaphone mouth with a pinched up fox face, thin eyes, snooty mouth, she’s all fox, yeah. And he’s a wolf. And he’s gonna rip her to shreds next time he sees her, because in his memory, she left without anything after he saved her life thirty goddamn times, and, no, she was never yellow, she was always a dark merciless violet. 

It isn’t that he thinks much of her when he does, only sometimes, when he’s especially exhausted by the noise of work boots scuffling round beyond his bedroom walls and bottles clinking. He thinks of her when he’s sixteen and has nothing else to think of, when he could think of what everyone else is thinking of, but then he’d get one of those work boots launched right at his head for choking so harshly on his own throat through those paper thin apartment walls. “I didn’t raise a pussy,” his father told him last time he’d heard him crying like that, and Jounouchi had told him back that he didn’t raise anybody at all, and Anzu had been the one to tell him he ought to see the school nurse for the swell in his cheek the next morning. 

Whatever, whatever, he’s being too vague, because if he thinks about thinking about the Pharaoh like everyone else is he’ll want to leave a hundred knuckle marks in the drywall. Not that thinking about Mai grants him so much less frustration. Once, he brings it up to Yuugi, something like _hey, heard from Mai lately?,_ and Yuugi told him no, and Yuugi pulled his head back beneath the covers because he’d liked to be alone as of late and Jounouchi only ever came by to try and pry him out of his bed, try and make him stop thinking so goddamn much. But that’s all anybody ever does when they lose something. Try and _think_ of why it happened, or what if it hadn’t, what if she showed up on his doorstep in a yellow sundress and asked if Jounouchi were home. He wonders what would happen if his father answered the door to that, but then he’s too sick to fantasize anymore. Nobody like that deserves to look at such a pretty yellow girl.

Honda and Anzu don’t have much to say about Mai, either. Honda says give her some time, she said she needed to find herself and remember her passions and all that classy shit, just relax. Anzu thinks just about the same thing, but she says it in a womanly way with lots more pretty syllables. She says Mai won’t forget about her first friend. Jounouchi tries to remember his own. 

They don’t say much about her, and maybe that’s what bothers him, because they all knew Mai just as well as he did, they should care more, they should miss her a little, too. But they’re busy thinking about _other things._ Maybe if he had some better closure he wouldn’t wonder so much about where she is or what she’s doing. At least the Pharaoh’s drinking Mojitos in Cairo right now. Or whatever the hell royalty does. Mai could be dead. Like, dead dead, not afterlife dead. She may as well be, if this is how she’s going to leave him hanging. 

He doesn’t think about her as often as he makes it seem. It’s only that first stretch of little while, where he’s readjusting to his life again, the same one he’d left when the last piece of the Puzzle set in place. It could have just been a dream for all he has left to show for what happened. And he’s awake now. One day, he’ll walk up to Yuugi and ask if he remembers playing Duel Monsters on top of a moving blimp, and Yuugi will tell him he’s got a cool imagination. Tournaments and Pharaohs and yellow girls only exist in his dreams. 

Perhaps it’s years before he picks up the kitchen phone again. It could be a cold January or he could still be dreaming, but he’s fairly fairly certain he’s alone for the afternoon and feeling it in his bones. A breath fills his mouth, fills his chest, and he can only hope to some god or another that she hasn’t changed her number.

When it’s ringing, he feels it in every fingertip, like he’s all done up in a rental tux and prom started an hour ago. His hand squeezes on the receiver. A breath dries his lips.

No amount of practice could set him straight when she answers, _“Hello?”_ unmistakably, “ _Hello?”_

Jounouchi opens his mouth in a wide gag that never releases. Heart gunning in both wrists, he keeps the phone to his face, a sliver of light falling from beneath another door where his feet stand on the cold tile. 

“...Mai?” Very nearly he regrets it, but it’s _out,_ now, it’s out and he can sway his head in an easy swing back, forth, waiting, a dance of nerves from spine to skin. 

He doesn’t know what she’s doing, but he can guess it isn’t much if she’s got the time to pick up a random call. Fingers tap the denim of his lap.

_“Who’s this? Eiji?”_

“Huh? Uh-” In a cough, he’s scuffling his steps on the tile. “It’s, uh, Jounouchi. Katsuya.”

He licks his teeth and maybe she sits up in whatever timeline she’s in, maybe she bolts right out of her seat and falls to her knees to beg his forgiveness right there over the phone. That’d be something. That’d light fire in his eyes like nothing else, though, again, he knows those are his thoughts, and the fine line has thickened enough to know Mai isn’t crying when her voice hitches the way it does next. She’s laughing in his face.

_“Jounouchi? The one and only? I knew you’d be calling soon, but I didn’t realize you’d jump on it the same day.”_

“What? The hell are you-?”

_“Look, honey, I admire your tenacity, but I’m just not that type of woman-”_

“What the hell are you _talking_ about, Mai?” he cuffs into the phone, and back to him she says, _“I’m not stupid, you’re eighteen today.”_

So what if he is! A hand cards through his thick bale of hair, the other still tight on the kitchen phone, mulling over where she’s pinched the conversation from burning on both ends. 

Like a storm, like an artist throwing acrylics to canvas in some wicked order of passion, he sneers his teeth all bared, hollers his face right hot. 

“I didn’t call you ‘cause I’m _legal_ , I called you ‘cause you left and haven’t talked to me in two years, you arrogant bitch!”

_“My, my,”_ she waits not a second to hum, _“somebody didn’t get the toy he wanted for his birthday, I see.”_

Eyes thinning shut, he exhales in strokes through the nose as he leans forward, forehead to the wall, fist trembling idly above. Blinks guide him back to life when in his ear it’s yawned, _“Well, it’s noon already, I’ve got my nail lady coming at two, so we should really continue this_ thrilling _chat later.”_

“It’s one o’clock,” Jounouchi corrects, squints at the neon stove clock. “Where are you?”

_“Shanghai!”_ marks the sweetest he’s heard her tone ever sound. _“You wouldn’t believe the fashion industry here. And the cu chao mian is to kill for! And there’s so many people, men don’t even bother trying to talk to you in public here, everyone just keeps walking and keeps to themselves. It’s a dream come true.”_

“Huh? Shanghai… How did you end up in India?”

_“China, you asshole,”_ she scoffs. There’s something of a shifting on her side, and muffled does he hear her yell some bold phrase in a language he doesn’t have the time nor skill for. When she comes back, she comes back laughing in a way no one does alone. _“I’ve spent some time just...roaming. Don’t worry about it. I told you I’d be back when I was ready.”_

“Well…” and his head tilts, and he murders the dry ridges of his lips against each other. “When are you gonna be ready?”

Maybe Mai spends the little stretch of silence thinking, or maybe she’s remembering something he doesn’t. Maybe she’s on the pier in her big sunhat, and her hands are delicate but his are rough from work, maybe she could tell him he’d be prettier without so much anger in his eyes. 

_“Maybe when our lease expires,”_ she nonchalants to him, as if her mouth is pink and flirty and her face dusted in calm. That’s the Mai he knows he remembers. _“Why? You don’t miss me, do you?”_

“ _No,”_ he coughs, kicks a toe to the trim on the bottom of the wall. Gruffly turns his mouth down as another laugh kisses his eardrums. “I don’t miss you, I just...wanted to know what you’re up to.”

_“You’ve always had an eye for other people’s business, Jounouchi.”_

Displeasure’s his color all over again. Mai breathes like she’s stretching her back, like she’s living for the first time since he’s known her, so maybe he ought to toss the phone back on the hook now and just be grateful he knows she’s still got a pulse.

_“Well, I’m sure you have some great big plans to attend to,”_ draws him back to his shaking hands again. _“I’ll let you get going. You’ll be seeing Yuugi and everyone else today, right? Give them my best.”_ Even if he’d pulled her trick right into the light, sometimes he wonders if she might really be a mindreader after all. But is it so hard to guess? Yes, great big plans tonight in Yuugi’s kitchen where his mother’s pretended she hasn’t made him a pink cake with chocolate frosting like he likes, and Honda and Anzu will be there, too, and his sister already called this morning but she might like to again, and maybe Otogi will throw him a half priced card pack next time he sees him, those are his great big plans for turning eighteen after living the past two years in a state of milky thought. He bites his lip, harder when she nods, _“Vivian says happy birthday, by the way.”_

“Who?” he snaps too quickly. “What, that sexy Chinese lady from the Grand Prix?”

_“Watch it, or I’ll start to get jealous.”_ Mai’s nails are probably beautiful, manicured, pristine, maybe a chip in one pointer finger that’s prompted a whole overhaul at two today. They’re perfect as they curl around the yellow phone cord she sits beside- or, no, she’s got to have a cell phone. She’s too pretty for a landline. Jounouchi tilts his head into a hand, eyes closed, heart staid.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he says. “...I should get going, then.”

_“Talk to you soon.”_

“Right,” he hopes she hears, for its certainty, conviction, though for how swiftly the line dies, he must wonder where it ends up.

His face is hot and wet with the perspiration of living for so long in the little airless realm of the phone call. In his own universe again, his feet are cold on the kitchen tile, his hands are rough, he’s eighteen today and the front door behind him begins to tremble with the effort of pushing a key inside. Watching it go, Jounouchi moves null at all until he’s turning away to find his bedroom for himself. The phone tosses onto the hook with a metal clack.

“I talked to Mai today,” he says what must be three or four or nine hours later. 

Over the back of the Mutous’ living room couch, Anzu leans, napkin bunched up in her hand to wipe the frosting off his cheek. “Really? That’s great, Jounouchi.”

“What’s she been up to?” Honda asks from his seat on the armchair, feet clunked up on the coffee table beside idle plastic cups. 

He lets the napkin swipe and fawn a minute as he thinks, because sometimes it’s nice to do that. Jounouchi thinks. Anzu moves to sit on the couch with Yuugi shifted toward the middle, mumbles something easy and they both laugh, and Honda’s over there with his feet on the table and Jounouchi’s right where he should be with a slice of pink cake in his lap and a yellow girl dancing in his head.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says back, leaning to take one idle plastic cup right into his hand. “She’s finally happy.”


End file.
